Symbolisme phonétique dans les noms propres inventés pour des contes français : à la recherche du niveau auquel se situe la relation son-sens

Abstract

Introduction: The hypothesis of phonetic symbolism, which seeks to characterize the motivational link between a signifier and its signified, remains controversial—particularly regarding the linguistic level at which the relationship between sound and meaning occurs. Objectives: To identify correlations between the phonological composition of character names from French folktales and certain semantic characteristics, using three phonemic classification models of increasing complexity. Method: The analysis focuses on 50 invented proper names drawn from the publications of Paul Delarue, as well as the tales of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Henriette-Julie de Castelnau de Murat, and other authors. The phonemic classification is based on three models of increasing complexity: Model 1 (two categories): voiceless vs. voiced consonants; Model 2 (three categories): oral stops, nasals, constrictives; Model 3 (five categories): voiceless oral stops, voiced oral stops, nasal stops, voiceless constrictives, voiced constrictives. The semantic variables considered include the characters’ gender, size, and agreeableness. A chi-squared test, followed by post hoc analyses, was used to evaluate the significance of associations between the phonemic models and the semantic variables. Results: The results vary depending on the classification model used, but only the significant findings from the more fine-grained Model 3 remain robust under post hoc testing. Conclusions: The variation in results across models does not allow for a definitive determination of the level at which a stable relationship between sound and meaning might exist. Furthermore, the small size of the corpus (50 names) calls for caution and underscores the need for a larger-scale study to explore these observations further.